NEO News: Week in Review – July 23rd – July 29th

NEO

The NEO blockchain experienced network congestion as a result of a spam attack, leaving users struggling to claim GAS or submit transactions in a timely manner. It is unknown at this time whether this was caused by a bug in a contract’s code, or was performed with malicious intent. NEO recently added a limit of 20 free transactions to a block as a spam countermeasure through the “MaxFreeTransactionsPerBlock” parameter. In this sense, the spam countermeasure worked as intended. However, to avoid being caught in the queue users are required to add a small priority transaction fee, allowing blocks to be filled well beyond the 20 free transaction limit.

Gaming

CryptoGladiator held its pre-sale and will offer one free gladiator to community members. CryptoGladiator is a blockchain based game where players collect gladiators with unique appearances and abilities through market transactions and cloning. Gladiators can be taken into the arena to participate in competitions to win prizes. CryptoGladiator recently won second place in the NEO Blockchain Black Horse competition, and earned high praise from Lin Pengtao, NEO Global Development (NGD) R&D director.

Ryu Coin published its whitepaper. Ryu Coin is a NEO based project that will enable video game players to bet on themselves in matches against other gamers. The whitepaper highlights Ryu Coin’s token economic model, the Ryu Vault smart contract for token wagers, dispute resolution via arbitrators, and future operations and expansion.

Tech Updates

QLC Chain released WinQ v1.2.7. New features were added to the application aimed at making it more accessible to novice users. Users can now connect to a VPN server three times for free before establishing a WinQ wallet. The app’s VPN page was also changed. There is now a drop-down menu containing the most popular server location settings such as the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore and others. QLC Chain has stated that it will be migrating WinQ from the NEO TestNet onto the NEO MainNet soon.

APEX recently released version 1.0 of the APEX Wallet. The mobile application has been released for both iOS and Android, and includes features such as multi-wallet management, NEP-5 token support, asset transfers via QR-code and personal data attributes through the distributed hash table (DHT) cloud.

Switcheo

Switcheo launched its V2 exchange, which comes with support for various new features to help improve the trading experience for users. One significant addition to the platform is the addition of a trading API. Additionally, Switcheo has added instant trade confirmations so that users may know precisely when an order has been filled.

Travala announced a Switcheo trading competition, to be held on the Switcheo platform between August 3rd to August 12th. The winners will be selected based on their total trading volume and only orders that have been fulfilled will be counted towards the competition. The competition will offer top traders a share in a 50,000 AVA prize pool for trading AVA with any supported trading pair.

Bounty Programs

Ontology revealed its technical community bounty program. 10% of the total Ontology token supply (100,000,000 ONT) is allocated to the technical community in an effort to incentivize developers to participate in the development and governance of the Ontology platform. Seven bounties have been added to kickstart the program.

Reports and Developments

PeerAtlas and IScientia have rebranded to NEO Health, following the partnership announced in May of 2018. NEO Health broadens the scope of the previous PeerAtlas project by aiming to include a complete medical ecosystem on the NEO blockchain. This is slated to include both an advanced medical information resource for doctors, and a complete web-based electronic medical record (EMR) platform for healthcare professionals. The entire NEO Health team is spending this summer in Belgium to collaborate on the rebranding and platform development in person.

Pikciochain has launched Hubble, an initiative that aims to build a technical community to support the development of the Pikciochain ecosystem. The Pikcio team believes Hubble will strengthen its brand, increase the number of Pikciochain’s real world uses, and build awareness of the project. In addition to the launch of Hubble, Pickio is planning to host a hackathon in August of 2018.

Travala announced some updates to their August roadmap, which features ‘aggressive’ expansion plans, key hires and further improvements to the Marketplace. The travel booking platform aims to add 80,000 properties over the next five weeks. The team acquired five top level key hires, and enhanced the search function in the Marketplace.

Partnerships

Asura Coin partnered with Spotcoin, with a goal of developing a deep assistance-based relationship to support one anothers platforms. Asura Coin’s ASA token will be listed on Spotcoin’s fiat exchange, whilst Asura will assist Spotcoin in return through an airdrop of SPOT tokens to members of the Asura ecosystem.

Alphacat recently partnered with J One Capital, the blockchain investment banking division of JD Capital, an investment firm which manages assets worth billions in USD. Alphacat aims to provide digital custody services for J One Capital, and J One Capital intends to assist in the development of Alphacat’s digital asset investment plan.

The NEO Eco Fund recently invested into Lympo, a fitness and wellness digital data platform. NEO Eco Fund is a subsidiary venture capital (VC) fund of NEO Global Capital (NGC). Lympo is an application that aims to motivate people to exercise and be healthy, by rewarding users with tokens for fitness-related tasks such as going to the gym regularly, jogging, or maintaining a healthy daily activity.

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About The Author: Dylan Grabowski

Dylan is a reformed urban planner with a passion for covering the Neo ecosystem. His objective as a writer for Neo News Today is to report news in an objective, fact-based, non-sensational manner. When not behind a computer screen, he can be found in the mountains rock climbing. Find Dylan on Twitter (@GrabowskiDylan).